AUTHOR: Borja Ortiz de Gondra
PUBLISHER: Literatura Random House
GENRE: Autofiction
READER’S NAME: Félix Lizárraga
DATE: May 31st, 2021

Nunca serás un verdadero Gondra (You Will Never Be a True Gondra) is the first novel by Borja Ortiz de Gondra (Bilbao, 1965), who has enjoyed a decades-long, successful career as a playwright and translator.  Nunca serás… marks his third incursion in the genre of autofiction, after his plays Los Gondra (una historia vasca) (The Gondras: A Basque Story), and Los otros Gondra (relato vasco) (The Other Gondras: A Basque Tale).

The creator of the autofiction genre, Serge Dubrovsky, defined it as: “Fiction, of events and facts strictly real”, as opposed to memoir and autobiography, which are supposed to be all fact, all the time. Nunca serás… is thus supposed to be a novel that deals with autobiographical facts by weaving them with fiction. (Or so I understand; apparently the jury is still out on what exactly autofiction is.)

To further muddle things, Borja, the eponymous narrator and protagonist of Nunca serás…, is in turn writing an autobiographical novel called Nunca serás un verdadero Arsuaga (You Will Never Be a True Arsuaga). In the present, Borja lives in New York with his boyfriend John, whom he refuses to marry for reasons of his own, works as a UN translator, and thinks he has successfully buried his past. A phone call from a relative makes that past erupt back into his life.

The book alternates then between Borja’s attempts to deal with that past, first starting to write his novel and then traveling back to Bilbao to face it, and chapters of his novel (whose protagonist is called Bosco) which function as flashback and deal with the event that made him break with his family and leave Bilbao with the intention of never coming back.

This event (Borja/Bosco’s younger brother’s wedding) is the fulcrum of the book. Those readers who are not familiar with Basque separatism and the terrorist acts of the organization known as ETA (Basque Homeland and Liberty), particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, may have a hard time making sense of the politics that loom over both the divisive violence in the past and the efforts to find healing in the present. Those politics, however, are much less important here in themselves than the lingering pain and suffering they leave in their wake.

Borja/Bosco also ruminates over the diaries and correspondence of an ancestor, the Gondra who brought the family back from Cuba (where they had made their fortune in the 1800s) and who was a secret homosexual, secretly in love with a Cuban guajiro (peasant), a relationship that ended when both men found themselves on the opposite sides of the war for Cuban independence.

The novel also deals with Borja’s relationship crisis, as well as his conflict at work with a particular supervisor. There is also a conference on historical memory that Borja attends, which serves as a meta commentary of sorts on the Basque ETA years. And there is the painful, persistent feeling of rootlessness that plagues Borja/Bosco, both in Bilbao (past and present) and in New York, and a running commentary on homophobia and its many faces and consequences.

This makes for a fascinatingly rich tapestry of characters, situations, and themes, though at moments I feel that Ortiz de Gondra bites much more than he can chew. His dialog is expressive and brilliant (probably due to his formative years and vast experience as a playwright) and much better than his occasionally plodding narrative prose, which tends to get bogged down by an overabundance of detail as well as by what seems to be a translator’s stilted choice of words (let’s say I encountered the adverb doloridamente for the first time ever in these pages, and I do hope it is my last time as well).

Despite this last observation, and despite the fact that the novel is over 400 pages long, I find that the book could have benefited from being longer, not shorter. An extra hundred pages could have given it more breathing room, and a somewhat less rushed denouement.

Nunca serás… is like a big, chewy, yet savory donut with a big hole in the middle: whatever gut-wrenching events transpired at Borja/Bosco’s brother wedding are constantly alluded to, yet never fully told. However, the torment they caused is ever-present in the lives of every single one of the Gondras, and in every single line of this uneven, yet hard to put down book. I recommend Nunca serás un verdadero Gondra for translation.